December 22, 2014

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2015 Year in “PreReview” in Technology

by Shirish Netke

The summer of 2015 marked the release of the blockbuster Sci-fi movie, “Terminator Genisys,” which grossed a record $350 million at the box office and further popularized the notion of time travel. In addition to sequels and prequels, Hollywood has now adopted plots for movies in which the audience can choose among alternate storylines and follow them to their logical conclusion. The future, as we know it, is plural. This year in our PreReview of 2015, we once again present a few alternative scenarios for the future from our vantage point at the end of 2014.

New business models created by emerging technologies and unforeseen partnerships dominated the headlines in 2015. Trending technologies such as the Internet of Things approached half the level of big data during 2015. Trending terms in the mainstream media such as drones and Bitcoin scored high in Google trends.

Here are three headlines from 2015 that caught our attention.

FedEx launches “parcelopter” service for 50-minute delivery

This is a premium delivery service powered by drones launched in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles to deliver gifts for the 2015 holiday season. A TV ad campaign for Parcelopter shows a real-time broadcast of a recipient opening the package viewed by the sender on a smartphone a few thousand miles away. It also shows a logistics team at FedEx headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee, which includes 20 drone pilots coordinating deliveries. FedEx is expected to parlay its holiday season experience and associated data to gain competitive advantage in its logistics business.

Drone cameras that can capture images at resolution of 2 cm are widely projected to replace satellite imagery (with 30 cm resolution) as a source of geospatial data in the future. FedEx field-tested the operations of drone delivery in downtown Manhattan for emergency medical supplies for seven hospitals in October, soon after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a set of regulatory guidelines for the commercial use of drones. Most industry analysts had expected that the FAA would miss the congressional deadline to release commercial drone guidelines in September and were unprepared for the holiday season. Google Express, AmazonFresh and Starbucks are expected to release their version of Parcelopter in 2016.

50 million Apple Watches sold

Sales of the Apple Watch have surpassed some of the most optimistic analyst forecasts for 2015. Critics had pronounced the product as unsuitable for both millennials, who do not use watches, as well as for baby boomers, who prefer a larger form factor. As it turns out, the killer app for the Apple Watch was not to tell time. Apple’s partnership with United HealthCare, Humana and Kaiser Permanente led to popularity of the Apple Watch as a health-monitoring device. Leading insurers are getting ready to announce a variable discount on premiums linked to physical activity.

In a related story, Apple denied that it approached Rolex to create a luxury brand of the Apple Watch. Earlier in 2015, luxury goods retailers that had stocked an 18K gold version of the Apple Watch have since dropped the product from their line. Meanwhile, speculation is rife about Apple buying a bitcoin company in 2016. Could this be the killer app for Apple Watch in 2016?

In-Stadium mobile ads for Super Bowl 50 will generate $20 million

Levi’s stadium in Santa Clara will host the first Super Bowl with the largest digital footprint in the history of the event. Infrastructure at the stadium for this event is being designed to serve 5 TB of data over 1,200 Wi-Fi hubs to 70,000 fans in the stadium during the game on February 7, 2016. Peak bandwidth usage is expected to reach 5 Gbps.

Advertisers set a price of $100,000 for a 10-second mobile ad spot. A mobile app will also deliver the advertised products from the concessions stands to one of 70,000 seats in the stadium. PepsiCo is rumored to have allocated $1 million to in-stadium advertising for the event.

NFL authorities are also in active discussion with Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple to crowdsource real-time sentiments about the game from sports fans through a series of mobile apps. Meanwhile, the most popular app for Levi’s stadium to date is Pnow. This app uses a predictive model to find the best time to use the restrooms based on real-time data feeds and historical data from the past 49 Super Bowl games.

Defining Business Analytics

What is Business Analytics? Business Analytics is the intersection of business and technology, offering new opportunities for a competitive advantage. Business analytics unlocks the predictive potential of data analysis to improve financial performance, strategic management, and operational efficiency.

What is BI? BI is the "computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing 'hard' business data, such as sales revenue by products or departments or associated costs and incomes. Objectives of BI implementations include (1) understanding of a firm's internal and external strengths and weaknesses, (2) understanding of the relationship between different data for better decision making, (3) detection of opportunities for innovation, and (4) cost reduction and optimal deployment of resources." (Business Dictionary). Most widely used BI tool is Microsoft Excel.
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What is Big Data? Big data refer to data scenarios that grow so large (petabytes and more) that they become awkward to work with using traditional database management tools. The challenge stems from data volume + flow velocity + noise to signal conversion. Big data is spawning new tools that are mix of significant processing power, parallelism and statistical, machine learning, or pattern recognition techniques
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Corporate performance management software and performance management concepts, such as the balanced scorecard, enable organizations to measure business results and track their progress against business goals in order to improve financial performance.
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Data visualization tools, include mashups, executive dashboards, performance scorecards and other data visualization technology, is becoming a major category.
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BI platforms provide a range of capabilities for building analytical applications. Examples are Oracle OBIEE, SAP Business Objects 4.0. There are many choices and combinations of BI platforms, capabilities and use cases as well as many emerging BI technologies such as in memory analytics, interactive visualization and BI integrated search. The idea of standardizing on one supplier for all of one’s BI capabilities is difficult to do. Increasingly, standardization and more about managing a portfolio of tools used for a set of capabilities and use cases.
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Data integration tools and architectures in support of BI continue to evolve. Extract-Transfer-Load (ETL) tools make up a big segment of this category in addition to data mapping tools. Organizations must now support a range of delivery styles, latencies, and formats.
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BI is about "sense and respond." Analytics is about "anticipate and shape" models.

About

Business Analytics 3.0 blog is meant for decision makers and managers who are trying to make sense of the rapidly changing technology landscape and build next generation solutions. It is aimed at helping business decision makers navigate the "Raw Data -> Aggregate Data -> Intelligence -> Insight -> Decisions" chain.